Head for the Arctic and you will hear crunches and creaks as icebergs bob along the turquoise waters.
They come in all sizes, gliding by, some shaped like birds or clouds or animals. Icebergs float about on the water, now blue, now milky grey.
And there is a sound like a shot when a chunk breaks off a glacier and a whole host of tiny ice shards are hurled into the water.
We behold this Arctic natural spectacle from aboard the MS Spitsbergen.
Then we spot a teenage polar bear, who we initially saw only as a small pale yellow dot on a distant iceberg. He is busy using the floes and chunks of ice to work his way closer to the ship.
Shy at first, he stays several hundred metres away. But the longer the vessel lies quietly in front of the glacier, the more curious the bear becomes.
He clambers from iceberg to iceberg, takes shortcuts through the water, stirs up the calm surface as he uses the ice floes.
Suddenly, he is right up close to the bow of the expedition ship.
The crunching of the ice is barely audible amid the murmur of the passengers, with several dozen standing on the decks.
They want to catch a glimpse of the world’s largest land predator. The animals are threatened with extinction so we are thrilled to see a teenage bear before us.
Tasty treats for bears
“It’s possible he was hoping for whale remains,” says Jorgine Tobiassen, known as JJ. Occasionally, Indigenous people come into Scoresbysund in Greenland by boat to hunt whales in the world’s longest fjord.
“The animals are processed straight on the boat; the remains are thrown back into the water.” That makes for a tasty treat for the bears.
JJ is the cook on board the ship, in charge of the Greenlandic dishes served daily at the buffet, as well as the Greenlandic menu that guests can book as an extra.
She was born and raised in Qaarsut in western Greenland. She talks about the customs of her fellow countrymen at the ship’s bar during one of many “Tiny Talks”.
Liam Northfield, an environmental scientist from Cambridge in England, and part of the scientific team hired on board the MS Spitsbergen to share their knowledge with passengers, talks about nature.
Scoresbysund the world’s largest fjord system on the east coast of Greenland, is 300km long and 50km wide at its widest points, he says.
In the northwest, it branches off into smaller fjords. The Greenlanders call it Kangertittivaq, meaning “great fjord”. The name we use today goes back to the British whaler William Scoresby, who sailed through Scoresbysund (also, Scoresby Sound) in the early 19th century.
A unique ecosystem has developed here over millennia, as human activity in Scoresbysund is minimal.
The last settlement is Ittoqqortormiit, situated right at the entrance to the fjord.
Just over 300 people live in the village, which has one tarmac road and many gravel tracks along which the locals travel in their 4x4s and quad bikes.
Snowmobiles are scattered throughout the village in the summer rain, as are boats of various sizes and dog sleds.
While fully-grown sled dogs are tethered on a small stone island, the puppies are still padding uncertainly through the village. They seem puzzled by the many people who have just disembarked from the expedition ship.
There is a museum, a shop, a Lutheran church, and a tourist information centre, though the latter turns out to be locked, stymieing passengers hoping to find out more about life in what is likely among the world’s most remote settlements.
You can only access Ittoqqortormiit by ship for two to three months of the year. The rest of the year, the waterways are frozen over.
“The fjord freezes over completely, with only small pools of water remaining where the sea ice freezes more slowly,” says Zoe Walker, a member of the scientific team on the MS Spitsbergen.
Each day, the ship’s scientific team gives at least one presentation, describing how the ice forms, how glacial ice differs from sea ice, and what lives and survives at the various depths of the Greenland Sea here in Kangertittivaq.
Citizen science
Heleen Middel, a whale scientist from the Netherlands, for example, gives a talk on the fascinating Greenland shark, which looks like an Arctic manatee but is much more threatening. We learn it takes 18 years to carry a calf to term.
Walker, together with passengers in the science boat, has taken samples from the Arctic waters to examine the plankton a few days later and to send them on to marine biologists conducting research in this field.
Such citizen science sees members of the public collecting data, making observations and documenting their findings, to contribute to scientific projects. On this cruise, this makes up part of the on-board programme.
Walker, a Canadian from the Yukon, wrote her Masters’ thesis on copepods – the kind of tiny underwater creatures that end up under the microscope in the ship’s Science Centre a few days after the samples were taken.
They look like lobsters, but are only a few millimetres in size. Walker says they are critical to the Arctic Ocean’s ecosystem, as they sit right at the bottom of the food chain. “They convert the solar energy absorbed by phytoplankton into biomass, which in turn provides food for larger fish and whales,” she says.
On this cruise, however, most of the large, spectacular marine creatures do not make an appearance. Walruses, seals, harbour seals and the elusive Greenland shark are more likely to be seen in winter.
However, as Captain Sverre Rud points out, no ship can sail as far north as 70° north latitude at that time of year.
The best chance of spotting whales is during the leg of the trip near Iceland, where the MS Spitsbergen sets sail for Kangertittivaq. Yet this one day at sea is so rough that most guests are preoccupied with things other than whale-watching.
But on land, which some passengers approach in rubber dinghies and small groups, animals do make an appearance.
On headlands and islands, they spot creatures with names such as Sydkap, Rødepynt, Rypenaes or Bjørne Øer – musk oxen, arctic foxes and, occasionally, a snow hare.
All this in a vast, surprisingly colourful landscape. The red sandstone and grey granite, along with low-growing plants, glow with autumnal colours this early September.
“There are no bushes or even trees here in the tundra,” says Northfield, the environmental scientist with a passion for geology. The tundra, with its permafrost, does not allow deep roots to form, which is why no plant is able to grow tall.
Here, it’s the mountains that provide the height anyway, both on land and in the water. The icebergs in the Greenland Sea can tower up to 90m above the water’s surface alone.
An impressive backdrop, even for the teenage polar bear. – VERENA WOLFF/dpa
